Continuing Mystery Of Missing Flight 370

Glib use of the word globalization leads us to believe that humans have overrun the whole planet. We haven't. Vast areas remain unexplored and inaccessible. Chief among these are dark abyssal plains beneath sunlit seas. And of these plains, the most newsworthy is below the Indian Ocean where the wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 likely lies.

This week marks the first anniversary of the flight's vanishing act. Never before in the 62-year history of the aviation industry has a scheduled commercial jet gone down without a trace, according to Bloomberg News.

Last year, on March 8, 12 crew and 227 passengers were on a routine six-hour flight from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. The well-equipped Boeing 777 was on course, on schedule and its flight was being tracked from the ground. Unexpectedly, it made a U-turn and headed west toward northern Sumatra before veering south over the abyss. All the while, its main communication system was inoperative.

During the initial days and weeks following the disappearance, hordes of military, government, private and personal aircraft, ships and submersibles crisscrossed an enormous search area approximating 1 percent of our planet. Finding nothing, they zoomed in on an area more than four times larger than Connecticut. As of Jan. 29, only one third of these 23,000 square miles had been intensively searched with high-resolution side-scan sonar.

This didn't not stop Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation from officially declaring that Flight 370 had gone missing over the southern Indian Ocean and that its occupants were presumed dead. This brought relief for some families because death certificates could be issued, claims made and new lives begun.

For those keeping hope alive and wanting the government to stay on task, it brought anger and frustration. For conspiracy theorists, this was joyful news because they could paint the government declaration as a cover-up. For me, the news was a reminder that Nature is larger and more mysterious than we are commonly led to believe.

To satisfy my need to know what happened, I used two simple thinking tools. The first is Occam's Razor, also known as the parsimony principle. It asserts that, given a set of unresolved competing explanations, the simplest one is most likely to be correct. Applying this principle, and using Newton's laws of motion, Flight 370 fell from the sky, struck the water without breaking up, sunk two miles to the bottom of the sea, and became obscured by the pudding-soft sediment that covers the ocean floor there.

The second thinking tool is the hypothesis. This is a question (what happened?) framed as a statement (it's down there!) that, when tested, will yield a binary (yes/no) answer. Testing this particular hypothesis requires a search. Positive evidence will confirm the hypothesis, ending the investigation. Negative evidence will yield two mutually exclusive answers: That our search methods were good enough and the plane is truly not there. Or that our methods were not good enough and we missed finding it.

Keep in mind that the ocean floor above the Australian-Indian tectonic plate isn't a rigid flat surface like a parking lot. It's a topographically complex place crosscut by linear valleys created by stretching and tearing of the rocky crust along geological faults. Above that crust is a thick mantle of ooze, a water-rich squishy sediment that settles continuously from suspended clay and plankton. When heavy objects like lost anchors and loaded airplanes strike the bottom, they are wholly or partially obscured by some combination of sinking and burial by the turbulent plumes of sediment sent up by the impact.

My guess is that we'll eventually find the plane and close the open door of this tragedy. In the meantime, the vanishing act of Flight 370 can be taken as a lesson that nature remains a place of deep mystery.